I would love to have been a fly on the wall back in the Carly Fiorina days during the HP/Apple negotiations. So much is influx. Windows needs something lightweight (and secure) and the Mac needs something that is better than casual gaming as an iOS hook. - Sony has had some good ideas, and lately so has HP but what to do if you are going to be second to market or have to wait for the Cupertino Juggernaut to make a mistake and *pray* that you can capitalize on this?
I have seen many good things this past 6 weeks, but what if apple's app store actually makes money (more than it does) when one twelfth or one tenth of the users are on on hackintoshes. No that is not 2011 but why not in three or five years. What if I take TCL/Tk app and redo it in GNORM (the NeXTStep environment for Linux)? What is an app other than an executable and the view?
Soon just like we can skin a phone or a laptop or an OS soon we will skin an app in XAML and then who fails? Apple is the good Unix.

Finish the gnustep desktop environment. Finish the Finder.app, finish Terminal.app, finish the web browser, finish the window manager (write it in obj-c entirely) as well as a chat client and the mplayer frontend. Then Linux will have something solid to compete against Mac OSX with. The APIs are pretty much there the DE in GNUStep needs fixing.

As much as I respect GNUStep, I think Enlightenment is a better choice if we truly want a Linux DE on par with Aqua. Unless, of course, you're referring to easy cross-compiling of apps. In that case, yes GNUStep would be a logical choice. But I honestly think E17 is closer to a "production ready" state, as well as being more modern and (dare I say it) prettier.

Also, GNUStep is more than just a DE, it's an entirely different way of approaching desktop computing than the normal Linux model. You can put Windowmaker on any Linux distro and it's just a look-and-feel thing; spin up the GNUStep live CD and you get a better idea of how great the whole GNUStep philosophy is.

How about this: Finish both, put them on top of Debian Squeeze and see which one comes out on ahead. I'd root for either one myself.